Period #9
Well, for the first time in three years I’m sick. I am grateful it’s not covid, but still feeling very whiny and sorry for myself with this unpleasant head cold. Therefore instead of finding links I want to tell you about a few books.
I have gotten in the chaotic habit of starting a lot of books and trying to read them all. I don’t mean two or three. I mean in addition to the four I am reading for pleasure I am partway through another eight for work (actively – there are many more I’ve read the first chapter or two and eventually mean to get back to, but won’t for a while). HOWEVER. Because one of them was due back at the library, and one of them really had to get finished for an independent study (a one-on-one class professors sometimes facilitate on very specialized topics with a graduate student) I finally finished TWO of them: Emilia Sanabria’s Plastic Bodies: Sex Hormones and Menstrual Suppression in Brazil, and Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness. I was so motivated by actually finishing two books that I have devoted myself to finishing Ruha Benjamin’s Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want this week (when last I wrote about it I was only a few chapters in). Also to be clear - I don’t do affiliate stuff, these are all just links I googled so you wouldn’t have to.
Sanabria’s book is important reading if you are a period dork like me: in addition to her ethnography of many relevant public spaces around menstruation, it was an extended look at Elsimar Coutinho himself, one of the most outspoken leaders of the menstrual suppression movement. Sanabria also ties in critical histories of the pill and how it has had an outsized effect on our (false) notion of the 28 day cycle, as well as problematizing US clinical trials that usually try to comply with the NIH’s guidelines around racial diversity by recruiting poor people of color in other countries. A dense read, but a fantastic one from start to finish.
O’Rourke’s book was half science, half memoir, and in certain ways reminded me of Abby Norman’s Ask Me About My Uterus in how deftly it combined the two. She is a gifted, poetic, honest writer, and connects her own experiences with chronic illness to the major debates (or perhaps, major silencing) around long COVID happening today.
I’m not done with Benjamin’s book (almost though, almost!) but I will say what I appreciate is the massive lens she brings. That is, she is interrogating the helplessness many of us feel when looking at structural racism, sexism, and more, and offering hope that small acts matter more than we realize… and she is doing it across nearly every domain of our lives. Benjamin offers real examples of how bathroom graffiti in a middle school invited a broader conversation about racism; how founding a small nonprofit started a waterfall of reparative efforts towards the Lacks family; how one transformative birth experience can change your relationship to parenthood.
One weird period fact
Most of us learn about the menstrual cycle as a series of steps. In the ovaries, you have competition for a dominant follicle (a fluid-filled sac containing an immature egg) the first half of the cycle. Then ovulation happens, after which one ovary sit there supporting the endometrium with its corpus luteum (the part of the sac left behind when the egg is ovulated, which produces progesterone) but otherwise being pretty passive. On the uterine side, you have an endometrium that grows for the first half of the cycle, then differentiates in the second, and at menses you have all of it sloughing off.
Just as in an earlier newsletter I’ve problematized the idea that menses is just about effluent removal (it is also about healing, repair, and starting to regrow endometrium) the ovaries deserve deeper study. It turns out that competition for a dominant follicle is more or less constant, with immature follicles growing and regressing, vying for first place, multiple times. In fact the waves of follicle development in the luteal phase are very important to whatever the final wave ends up being in the subsequent cycle.
This is just one more vignette supporting the idea that the menstrual cycle is a vibrant, dynamic process with many moving parts. It is almost never about passively waiting for things to happen, but about building uterine infrastructure and releasing a high-quality egg with intention.
One of many sources on this: Baerwald, A. R., G. P. Adams, and R. A. Pierson. “A New Model for Ovarian Follicular Development during the Human Menstrual Cycle.” Fertility and Sterility 80 (2003): 116–22.